A fatal wait: Veterans languish and die on a VA hospital's secret list

News Buzzard wrote:

WHL wrote:You have to be naive to believe there were no weapons of mass destruction.  They got moved out or hidden before we got there.

Where were they and where did they go? Are you telling me we didn't have the technology to track them? You're grasping at straws if you thought Saddam was a threat to us.

There really were WMDs in Iraq, which justified the Iraq war. They were secretly moved right before the Iraq war started. An unholy triangle existed between Iraq’s Saddam, Russia, and Syria.

The Democrats knew this, and slandered Bush for political gain, and destroyed US reputation around the world. So, who are the Democrats really working for – the USA or terrorists – or just themselves?
http://heavenawaits.wordpress.com/the-syria-wmd-conspiracy/

Anti Federalist wrote:This is the face of socialized medicine, coming soon for all of us.

My father was a veteran of World War II, and thus eligible to receive medical treatment at the VA hospital that operated a few miles from our house. He used it exactly once. His experience with what the Veterans Administration calls “health care” was so awful that he claimed to be more in fear of his life within the walls of that VA facility than he had ever been while on active duty in Europe. I confess that, at the time he made this assertion, I assumed he was indulging a penchant for hyperbole. I have long since learned otherwise.

The recent revelations about veterans left for dead on secret waiting lists merely constitute the latest in a long series of scandals involving the atrocious care patients receive at VA hospitals. To provide just a few examples, veterans have gone missing from their rooms and been later found dead of exposure on hospital grounds, they have been exposed en masse to  the HIV virus due to the use of unsterilized instruments, and some have even contracted Legionnaires’ Disease after being rash enough to drink the water at a VA facility...

And, make no mistake about it, money and control are what the Democrats care about. They are, along with the White House, simulating outrage of course. Indeed, White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough went on Face the Nation yesterday and claimed, “The president is madder than hell.” Right.

Neither Obama nor his congressional accomplices give a rat’s posterior about the quality of care endured by the veterans who have fought, and frequently been maimed, to protect the way of life their party has worked so hard to undermine.

If Obama is angry, it’s because the scandal comes at a very bad time in the election cycle. It means nothing to him that a man like my father, who trudged around Europe fighting Nazis for two years, was afraid to go to a VA hospital. Some of the VA scandals cited above occurred on Obama’s watch and he yawned. Moreover, his DOJ has no plans to look into the latest outrages. The lessons of this scandal are that government-run health care doesn’t work and that the Democrats who promote it should be given the bum’s rush in November.

—http://spectator.org/articles/59261/obvious-lessons-va-scandal

Think Obamacare is a good thing? If anyone wants to know how the government will run the health care system they should pay attention to the Veterans Administration scandal now being exposed in the media. The shocking, deplorable, disgusting treatment of our wounded and traumatized vets is a huge warning flag about how our health care system will fail with Obamacare and over 2000 pages of federal regulations.
—BPK.com

'Yesterday I posted about the monumental hypocrisy of Obama and his team for their claim that they were “mad as hell” at the horror show that our vets medical care has become. When I wrote that I was unaware that Obama had actually claimed that he first heard about the mess from the news.

Friends, that claim is an absolute insult to every American and to every vet. Once again he is displaying lack of respect for your intellect.

It is absolutely clear that he knew about the horror show before he took office, he was warned by the transition team that the VA was in a horrible mess and had been so for years, dating at least back to Clinton. Obama gave speeches promising to fix the problem. For him to claim he knew nothing of it is an absolute disgrace to the Office he holds.

For God’s sake he even speechified about it in 2008-2009, and promised to fix it immediately.

Then I recalled that he had used the same lie in speaking about Fast and Furious, and the IRS scandal. Obama has no respect for his constituency, he consider them to be fatuous dullards.

Obama is a short termer and his political clout is definitely waning. But one must wonder why and how any decent Democrat can defend his actions. I hope that all will consider the Democrats failure to sanction Obama when the midterms come around. There is now no doubt but that the independents have had their fill of Democrat chicanery.
—BPK.com[/size]

As of yesterday's writing, the total was nine. Now it's up to eleven and counting, with new "isolated cases" in Florida and West Virginia expanding the scope of the scandal.

CNN: An audit team sent to the Malcom Randall VA Medical Center in Gainesville, Florida, discovered a list of patients needing follow-up appointments that was kept on paper instead of in the VA's electronic computer system. As a result, the VA's Office of Inspector General has opened an investigation and three members of the Gainesville VA's supervisory staff have been placed on paid leave, pending the outcome of an investigation
Townhall.com

"The EASIEST thing the Congress could do would be to simply decree that the military ID, active and retired, was a "credit" card that would let them go to ANY medical office – doctor or hospital – and get whatever medical treatment they need. From what I read, that would cost a heck of a lot less than the VA system… which dates to a time in our history when there were VERY few qualified hospitals, period."

(From The Wall Street Journal)

The Federal Labor Relations Authority, the agency that mediates federal labor disputes, earlier this month ruled in favor of this union president, in a dispute over whether she need bother to show up at her workplace—the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Martinsburg, W.Va. According to FLRA documents, this particular VA employee is 100% “official time”—D.C. parlance for federal employees who work every hour of every work day for their union, at the taxpayer’s expense.

In April 2012, this, ahem, VA “employee” broke her ankle and declared that she now wanted to do her nonwork for the VA entirely from the comfort of her home. Veterans Affairs attempted a compromise: Perhaps she could, pretty please, come in two days a week? She refused, and complained to the FLRA that the VA was interfering with her right to act as a union official. The VA failed to respond to the complaint in the required time (perhaps too busy caring for actual veterans) and so the union boss summarily won her case.

The VA battle is only just starting, but any real reform inevitably ends with a fight over organized labor. Think of it as the federal version of Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan and other states where elected officials have attempted to rein in the public-sector unions that have hijacked government agencies for their own purpose. Fixing the VA requires first breaking labor’s grip, and the unions are already girding for that fight. "
—Town Hall

WASHINGTON — Staff members at dozens of Department of Veterans Affairs hospitals across the country have objected for years to falsified patient appointment schedules and other improper practices, only to be rebuffed, disciplined or even fired after speaking up, according to interviews with current and former staff members and internal documents.

The growing V.A. scandal over long patient wait times and fake scheduling books is emboldening hundreds of employees to go to federal watchdogs, unions, lawmakers and outside whistle-blower groups to report continuing problems, officials for those various groups said.

In interviews with The New York Times, a half-dozen current and former staff members — four doctors, a nurse and an office manager in Delaware, Pennsylvania and Alaska — said they faced retaliation for reporting systemic problems. Their accounts, some corroborated by internal documents, portray a culture of silence and intimidation within the department and echo experiences detailed by other V.A. personnel in court filings, government investigations and congressional testimony, much of it largely unnoticed until now...
—NYTs

Anti Federalist wrote:

Roughly half the schedulers at multiple Veterans Affairs hospitals said they received instructions from supervisors to falsify data and hide the true time it took patients to be seen by a doctor after making an appointment, new details from an internal VA audit show. Schedulers said supervisors directed them to manipulate information so their centers could meet performance goals, which would help top officials get bonuses, according to documents obtained by CNN. The new information also provided to Congress this week includes updates from specific VA hospitals that were not included in an internal audit released last month...

Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), the first openly gay member of the U.S. Senate, may have landed herself in some trouble after it was reported her office did little to address the rather high rate of opiate prescriptions coming out of the Veterans Affairs center in Tomah, Wisconsin. As a result, Baldwin's office fired a top aide, offered her a severance package, and a confidentiality agreement. The aide, Marquette Baylor, rejected the deal and is filing a sexual discrimination lawsuit against Baldwin. At the same time, Baldwin's office had the Tomah VA report since last summer. To make matters worse, three..."
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2015/02/22/sen-tammy-baldwin-lawyers-up-after-three-deaths-are-linked-to-a-va-report-she-sat-on-for-months-n1960467

Mrs. Brown, a former employee in the VA’s Oakland office, was assigned one day in 2012 to a special team given the job of reviewing more than 13,000 veterans’ claims dating back to the mid-1990s that had never been addressed. As they sorted through the mounds of papers, she said, they often discovered that the veterans had long since died without receiving the requested benefits.

In those cases, Mrs. Brown testified, VA managers instructed employees to mark the files “NAN” — for “no action necessary.” But she said taking that step also prevented a veteran’s survivors from receiving benefits.

“If the widow ever came in to file a claim … there’s nothing there,” she told the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, her voice breaking. “There’s no information about her husband. On a daily basis, we were seeing piles of [claims] set aside. It was our obligation to contact that family. We didn’t do that. We should have.”

A VA official from Oakland assured lawmakers that the agency has since taken care of all the old claims, but Mrs. Brown called that “a lie.”

VA Assistant Inspector General Linda Halliday testified Wednesday that as recently as last month, her office discovered another 1,300 old documents in the Oakland office, including “claims that still require action.”
The Washington Times